“Hey,” I said, kicking the sofa to get Rafe’s attention. “I don’t remember. What happened?”
“It was that prat Mackey,” Rafe said. He took the vodka bottle from Justin and topped up his glass, not bothering with tonic. “Bright and early on the Monday morning, he’s at the door, telling us he’s got news and asking if he can come in. Personally I would have told him to fuck himself, I’d seen enough cops that weekend to last me a lifetime, but Daniel answered the door and he had this crackpot theory that we shouldn’t do anything that might antagonize the police—I mean, Mackey was already antagonized, he hated us all on sight, what was the point of cozying up to him?—so he let him in. I came out of my room to see what the story was, and Justin and Abby were coming out of the kitchen, and Mackey stood there in the hall looking round at us all and said, ‘Your friend’s going to make it. She’s awake and asking for breakfast.’ ”
“And we were all overjoyed,” Abby said. She had found the needle and was stabbing at the doll’s dress with short, angry stitches.
“Well,” Rafe said. “Some of us were. Justin was clutching onto the door handle grinning like an idiot and sagging as if his knees had gone out from under him, and Abby started laughing and jumped on him and gave him this huge hug, and I think I made some kind of weird whooping noise. But Daniel . . . he just stood there. He looked—”
“He looked young,” Justin said suddenly. “He looked really young and really scared.”
“You,” Abby told him sharply, “were in no state to notice anything.”
“I was. I was looking at him specifically. He was so white he looked sick.”
“Then he turned round and walked in here,” Rafe said, “and leaned on the window frame, looking out at the garden. Not a word. Mackey gave the rest of us the eyebrow and asked, ‘What’s up with your mate? Isn’t he pleased?’ ”
Frank had never mentioned any of this. I should have been annoyed—he was one to talk about playing dirty—but he seemed like some half-forgotten person from another world, a million miles away.
“Abby disentangled herself from Justin and said something about Daniel being all emotional—”
“Which he was,” Abby said, and bit off a thread with a snap.
“—but Mackey just smiled this cynical little smirk and then left. As soon as I was sure he was actually gone—he’s the type who would hang around eavesdropping in shrubberies—I went in to Daniel and asked him what the fuck his problem was. He was still at the window, he hadn’t moved. He pushed his hair off his face—he was sweating—and he said, ‘There isn’t a problem. He’s lying, of course; I should have realized that immediately, but he caught me off guard.’ I just stared at him. I thought he had finally lost it.”
“Or you have,” Abby said crisply. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“You and Justin were busy dancing around hugging each other and making squeaky noises, like a pair of Teletubbies. Daniel gave me this irritated look and said, ‘Don’t be nave, Rafe. If Mackey were telling the truth, do you honestly believe that would be unadulterated good news? Hasn’t it even occurred to you just how serious the consequences could have been?’ ”
He took a long swallow of his drink. “You tell me, Abby. Does that sound overjoyed to you?”
“Jesus Christ, Rafe,” Abby said. She was sitting up straight, eyes snapping: she was getting angry. “What are you babbling about? Are you losing your mind? Nobody wanted Lexie to die.”
“You didn’t, I didn’t, Justin didn’t. Maybe Daniel didn’t. All I’m saying is that I’ve got no way of knowing what he felt when he checked Lexie’s pulse; I wasn’t there. And I can’t swear I know what he’d have done if he realized she was alive. Can you, Abby? After these last few weeks, can you swear, hand on heart, that you’re absolutely positive what Daniel would have done?”
Something cold slipped across the back of my neck, riffled the curtains, spiraled off to nose delicately in corners. All Cooper and the Bureau had been able to tell us was that she had been moved after she died; not how long after. For at least twenty minutes they had been alone together in the cottage, Lexie and Daniel. I thought of her fists, clenched tight—extreme emotional stress, Cooper had said—and then of Daniel sitting quietly beside her, carefully tapping ash into his smoke packet, droplets of soft rain catching in his dark hair. If there had been anything more than that—a hand twitching, a gasp; wide brown eyes staring up at him, a whisper almost too faint to hear—no one would ever know.
Long night wind sweeping across the hillside, owl calls fading. The other thing Cooper had said: doctors could have saved her.
Daniel could have made Justin stay in the cottage, if he had really wanted to. It would have been the logical thing to do. The one who stayed had nothing to do, if Lexie was dead, except keep still and not touch anything; the one who went back to the house had to break the news to the others, find the wallet and the keys and the Maglite, stay calm and work fast. Daniel had sent Justin, who could barely stand up.
“Right up until the night before you came home,” Rafe told me, “he insisted you were dead. According to him, the cops were just bluffing, claiming you were alive so we’d think you were talking to them. He said all we had to do was keep our heads and they’d back down sooner or later, they’d come up with some story about how you’d relapsed and died in hospital. It wasn’t until Mackey phoned to ask if he could drop you off the next day, if we’d be home—that was when it hit Daniel that, duh, there might not actually be some huge conspiracy going on; this might actually be as simple as it looked. Lightbulb moment.”
He took another big swig of his drink. “Overjoyed, my shiny white arse. I’ll tell you what he was: he was petrified. All he could think about was whether Lexie had really lost her memory or whether she’d just said that to the cops, and what she might do about it once she got home.”
“So?” Abby demanded. “Big deal. We were all worried about that, if we’re honest. Why not? If she did remember, she’d have had every right to be raging with the lot of us. That evening you came home, Lex, we’d been like a bunch of cats on hot bricks all day. Once we realized you weren’t angry or anything, we were OK—but when you got out of that cop car . . . Jesus. I thought my head was going to explode.” For one last second, I saw them again the way I had that evening: a golden apparition on the front steps, shining and poised like young warriors stepped out of some lost myth, heads lifted, too bright to be real.
“Worried,” Rafe said, “yes. But Daniel was a lot more than worried. He was so hysterically nervous that it was making me nervous too. Finally I cornered him—I had to sneak up to his room late at night, like we were having an affair or something; he was bloody careful not to let me get him alone—and I asked him what the hell was up. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘We have to accept the fact that this may not be over so easily. I think I have a plan that should cover all eventualities, but a few of the details are still unclear. Try not to worry about it for the moment; it may never come to that.’ What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“Not being a mind reader,” Abby said crisply, “I haven’t a clue. I assume he was trying to reassure you.”
A dark lane and a tiny click, and that note in Daniel’s voice: focused, absorbed, so calm. I could feel my hair lifting. It had never occurred to me, not once, that the gun might not have been pointing at Naylor.
Rafe snorted. “Oh, please. Daniel didn’t give a damn about how any of us felt—including Lexie. All he cared about was finding out whether she remembered anything and what she was going to do next. He wasn’t even subtle about it; he was blatantly pumping her for information, every chance he got. Do you remember what route you took that night, are you taking the jacket or would you rather not, oh Lexie do you want to talk about it . . . It made me sick.”
“He was trying to protect you, Rafe. Us.”
“I don’t need protecting, thanks very much. I’m not a bloody child. And I definitely, definitely don’t ne
ed protecting by Daniel.”
“Well, good for you,” said Abby. “Congratulations, big man. Whether you feel you needed it or not, he was doing his best. If that’s not good enough for you—”
Rafe gave a jerky, one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe he was. Like I said, I’ve got no way to know for sure. But if he was, then his best is pretty crap, for such a smart guy. These last few weeks have been hell, Abby, living hell, and they didn’t need to be. If Daniel had just listened to us, instead of doing his best . . . We wanted to tell you,” he said, swinging round to me. “All three of us. When we found out you were coming home.”
“We really did, Lexie,” said Justin, leaning over the arm of his chair towards me. “You don’t know how many times I almost . . . God. I thought I was going to explode, or disintegrate or something, if I didn’t tell you.”
“But Daniel,” Rafe said, “wouldn’t let us. And look how well that’s turned out. Look how well every single one of his ideas has turned out. Look at us; where he’s got us.” His hand flying up to all of us, to the room, bright and desperate and cracking at the seams. “None of this needed to happen. We could’ve called an ambulance, we could’ve told Lexie straight off—”
“No,” Abby said. “No. You could have called an ambulance. You could have told Lexie. Or I could have, or Justin. Don’t you dare put this all on Daniel. You’re a grown man, Rafe. Nobody held a gun to your head and made you keep your mouth shut. You did it all by yourself.”
“Maybe. But I did it because Daniel told me to, and so did you. You and I were on our own here for how long, that night? An hour? More? And the only thing you could talk about was how badly you wanted to get help. But when I said yeah, OK, let’s do it, you said no. Daniel said not to do anything. Daniel had a plan. Daniel would handle it.”
“Because I trust him. I owe him that, that much at least, and so do you. This—everything we’ve got—it’s because of Daniel. If it weren’t for him, I’d be on my own in a scary underground bedsit right this minute. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you—”
Rafe laughed, a loud, harsh, startling sound. “This fucking house,” he said. “Every time anyone hints that your precious Daniel might not be perfect, you throw the house in our faces. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut because I thought maybe you were right, maybe I owed him, but now . . . I’ve just about had it up to my tits with this house. Another of Daniel’s brilliant ideas, and how well has this one worked out? Justin’s a wreck, you’re six feet deep in denial, I’m drinking like my father, Lexie almost died, and most of the time we all hate one another’s guts. All because of this fucking house.”
Abby’s head came up and she stared at him. “That’s not Daniel’s fault. He just wanted—”
“Wanted what, Abby? What? Why do you think he gave us all shares in the house to start with?”
“Because,” Abby said, low and dangerous, “he cares about us. Because, right or wrong, he figured this was the best way to make sure all five of us were happy.”
I expected Rafe to laugh out loud at that, too, but he didn’t. “You know,” he said after a moment, staring down into his glass, “I thought that too, at first. I really did. That he was doing it because he loved us.” The vicious edge had fallen out of his voice; all that was left was a simple, tired melancholy. “It made me happy, thinking that. There was a time when I would’ve done anything for Daniel. Anything.”
“And then you saw the light,” Abby said. Her voice was hard and brittle, but she couldn’t keep the shake out of it. She was more upset than I’d ever seen her, more upset even than when I’d brought up the note in the jacket. “Someone who gives his best friends most of a seven-figure house is obviously doing it for purely selfish reasons. Paranoid much?”
“I thought about that. I’ve thought about this a lot, the last few weeks. I didn’t want to—God . . . But I couldn’t help it. Like picking at a scab.” Rafe looked up at Abby, shaking his hair out of his face; the booze was soaking in and his eyes were bloodshot and puffy, as if he’d been crying. “Say we’d all ended up in different colleges, Abby. Say we’d never met. What do you think we’d be doing now?”
“I don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re talking about.”
“We’d be OK, the four of us. Maybe we would’ve had a tough first few months, maybe it would’ve taken us a while to get to know people, but we’d have done it. I know none of us were the outgoing type, but we’d have learned. That’s what people do, in college: they learn to function in the big scary world. By now we’d have friends, social lives—”
“I wouldn’t,” Justin said, quietly and definitely. “I wouldn’t be OK. Not without you guys.”
“Yes you would, Justin. You would. You’d have a boyfriend—you too, Abby. Not just someone who shares a bed with you occasionally, when the day’s been too much to take. A boyfriend. A partner.” He gave me a sad little smile. “You, silly thing, I’m not so sure. But you’d be having a lot of fun, either way.”
“Thanks for sorting out our love lives,” Abby said coldly, “you patronizing prick. The fact that Justin doesn’t have a fella doesn’t make Daniel the Antichrist.”
Rafe didn’t rise to that, and for some reason that frightened me. “No,” he said. “But think about this for a second. If we’d never met, what do you think Daniel would be doing now?”
Abby gave him a blank stare. “Climbing the Matterhorn. Running for office. Living right here. How the hell do I know?”
“Can you see him going to the Freshers’ Ball? Joining college societies? Chatting up some girl in American Poetry class? Seriously, Abby. I’m asking. Can you?”
“I don’t know. It’s all if, Rafe. If doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got no idea what would have happened if everything had gone differently, because I’m not bloody clairvoyant, and neither are you.”
“Maybe not,” Rafe said, “but I know this much. Daniel would never, no matter what, never have learned how to deal with the outside world. I don’t know if he was born this way or if he was dropped on his head as a baby or what, but he’s just not capable of living a normal human life.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Daniel,” Abby said, cold fine syllables like chips of ice splintering. “Nothing.”
“There is, Abby. I love him—yes, I do, I still do—but there’s always been something wrong with him. Always. You have to know that.”
“He’s right,” Justin said, softly. “There has. I never told you, but back when we first met, back in first year—”
“Shut up,” Abby snapped viciously, whirling on him. “You shut your mouth. What makes you any different? If Daniel’s fucked up, then you’re just as fucked up as he is, and you, Rafe—”
“No,” Rafe said. He stared down at his finger tracing patterns in the condensation on his glass. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The rest of us—when we want to, we can hold conversations with other people, for God’s sake. I picked up a girl, the other night. Your tutorial brats love you. Justin flirts with that blond guy who works in the library—you do, Justin, I’ve seen you; Lexie had a laugh with the people in that awful café. We can connect with the rest of the world, if we put in the effort. But Daniel . . . There are only four people on the planet who don’t think he’s a full-on freak show, and all four of them are in this room. We’d have been OK without him, one way or another, but he wouldn’t have been OK without us. If it weren’t for us, Daniel would be lonelier than God.”
“So?” Abby demanded, after a long second. “So what?”
“So,” Rafe said, “if you ask me, that’s why he gave us shares in the house. Not to make our lives all sunshiny. To have company, here in his private universe. To keep us, for good.”
“You,” Abby said. She was breathless. “You nasty-minded little piece of work. Where you get the sheer brass neck—”
“It was never us he was protecting, Abby. Never. It was this: his own ready-made little world. Tell me this: why did you ride in to the cop shop with
Daniel, this morning? Why didn’t you want him to be alone with Lexie?”